


before the world was big

by lavenderbushes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, M/M, canon typical alternia is shitty, reference to hunting, reference to past involuntary drug use, the psiioniic is autistic and you can pry that from my dead hands, weed use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-23 18:42:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavenderbushes/pseuds/lavenderbushes
Summary: You don’t understand him. To be fair, there’s an ever-expanding list of things you don’t understand now that you’re out in the real world again, but unlike the other concepts you’re getting familiar with, you don’t think you’ll ever be able to wrap your head around him, his family. How easily kindness comes to him. How he could look at a forgettable psion in an institute training to fight for everything he stands against and see something worth saving.





	before the world was big

**Author's Note:**

> hee hee hee!! this fic was written for the distant past ancestors zine which can be downloaded [ here!](https://distantpastzine.itch.io/distant-past-zine)
> 
> i just love the inner circle a lot! and i love psiignciple!!! and i wanted to write about them being silly young adults who smoke phat bowls before shit Escalates 
> 
> the title is from [ before the world was big by girlpool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVZcc_iy4DA) >:) it's a banger

There is no routine here. 

It’s one of the hardest things to get used to, now that you’ve left. Your life had been sterile walls and nights timed out to the minute and then it was over, sweeps and sweeps of schedule made instinctual gone in a moment. You don’t know what to do with yourself now that you have time that is finally your own. 

The others relocating with you seem to fall into the disorder like it was natural, talking with each other as you all trek further and further into the woods, laughing over grubloaf and relaxing in the patches of long grass after they finished making camp. You don’t fit. You’re too busy crawling in your own skin, your edges too sharp and definite to just  _ be _ with all of them. Nothing feels right and you keep telling yourself that this is  _ good _ , leaving was  _ good _ for you because he said so, said that you deserved better but this is so far from anything  _ good  _ used to mean and sometimes you’re drowning in it, that new definition. Sometimes you can’t come up for air. 

When that happens, you find yourself going to the perimeter of camp to look for the highest branch on the highest tree, picking yourself up with your psi until you’re nestled out of sight and just closing your eyes and  _ waiting _ to feel nothing again, for your skin to not be hot to the touch and your brain not to be scrambled until it’s static. Leaving the moment entirely like it’s a switch you can flick off and pretending you’re still in the familiarity of being alone for as long as you can. It’s a crutch and you’re making an effort to rely on it less and less but you’re here again, trying to catch your breath and distract yourself with the background image of everyone below you going about their night. It’s comforting, being able to see everything go on in front of you without having to be a part of it yourself. There aren’t any surprises. 

And then you see him.

Watching The Signless weave through conversations is like staring down a sun about to supernova, bright and beautiful and undeniable. He’s the center of the sky and you can feel the tug of being in his orbit whenever you're around him and you’ve felt that feeling before but with him, for the first time, it’s not negative, not  _ smothering,  _ and that catches you off guard. He's held out a tether for you- for  _ all _ of you- and while everyone around you has gladly accepted, you hesitate. You want nothing more than to find something to grab onto but when it's in front of you, when it has a voice and it says  _ “just checking in,”  _ or  _ “we're always here if you need anything,” _ all soft and inviting, when it's  _ real _ , you don't know what to do but cave into yourself.

He continues making his social rounds, talking to everyone around the camp you all set up a couple of days ago. It’s all mismatched: tents fashioned from heavy light-reflective fabric resting on top of wooden spears embedded into the ground, sprinkled here and there under the protection of thick canopies of trees, a firepit off towards the clearing with logs and blankets in the grass surrounding it, a crate full of sopor patches lying open. You watch him turn to another troll, say a few words and then rest his hand on their shoulder in one disarming movement. Even from your perch, you can see whoever he’s talking to relax under his touch, like they finally breathed out without being aware they were holding their breath in the first place. _ _

_ Does he know that he can take everyone’s walls down in the same sentence and not even be trying? Does he know how much power he has just through a hand on a shoulder, a soft word on his lips, a glance that impossibly but unconditionally knows so much? _

You don’t understand him. To be fair, there’s an ever-expanding list of things you don’t understand now that you’re out in the real world again, but unlike the other concepts you’re getting familiar with, you don’t think you’ll ever be able to wrap your head around him, his family. How easily kindness comes to him. How he could look at a forgettable psion in an institute training to fight for everything he stands against and see something worth saving.

You hear the scratching of claws on wood and the rustle of disturbed leaves, then nothing, before a sudden flash of green pops into the corner of your sight as someone takes a hold of your branch from the lower canopy and swings up onto it in one fluid motion.

All instinct, your psi shoots out in front of you and takes hold of them, pushing them  _ back _ and leaving them hovering away from the branch in an outline of red and blue all within seconds. You’re fight or flight, barely allocating enough thought from escape routes to keep yourself breathing, until you realize there’s a voice in the background of your racing mind. Until you look up.

You’re holding The Disciple over a fifty-foot drop to the ground.

She reaches her hand out to you, the motion weighed down in the fog of your psi. “Hey, hey, you’re okay. Listen to me. I need you to find your breathing with me- that’s it. Slow breath in, slow breath out.” Still somewhere else, you follow her words. “That’s perfect. Just keep breathing.” 

You slowly relax your white-knuckled grip on the trunk you previously didn’t even know you were doing, focusing on carefully carrying her over to the branch you’re on and setting her down as delicately as you can. Once your hold is off of her, your hands start to quiet their shaking and you wipe the sweaty tendrils of bangs clinging to your forehead off of your face, but the dread in your chest stays put. You just attacked a member of the inner circle. You almost  _ culled  _ a member of the inner circle.

She pulls in her legs to sit cross-legged on the limb, combing her dreads out of her eyes, absently picking at the splatters of blood on her clothes. She must’ve been hunting. If there’s still any fear from before, she doesn’t show it on her face. “I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you like that, promise-” you start aggressively signing  _ sorry _ over and over until she gently takes your hand mid-motion and puts it back in your lap, “ _ -hey. _ You don’t have anything to apologize over,  _ I’m  _ the one who should be saying sorry for nearly making your pusher beat out of your chest! I didn’t think anyone would be up here with me is all.” She finds your gaze and gives you a reassuring smile. “I’ve done way worse on reflex, trust me.”

“Psii, right?” You nod. “Well, Psii, I can totally climb down if I’m interrupting anything, no hard feelings. There are plenty of trees I can look for chirpbeast’s eggs in instead.”

You hesitate and then decisively shake your head, signing  _ I’m okay.  _ She smiles again, that same unmistakable fire in her eyes.

There’s a quiet, and she looks out to the skyline and everything below, the current of the wind rippling through you both and making the beads at the ends of her hair chime a soft twinkling sound. She pulls her legs into her chest in the cold. “You can see everything from up here,” she says under her breath. “It’s beautiful.”

You look out with her, at the stars, at the trolls underneath their light, trying to hush your mind into seeing the world before you as something more than an accumulation of potential threats until your pan hurts from the focus and you turn to her instead, her eyes still transfixed on where the canopy of trees meets sky. You don’t understand what she sees, what makes her smile about surveying all of that unknown, but gods, you want to. You want to more than anything.

She looks back to you, resting her head on her knees and holding your gaze in the comfortable silence. “I know it usually isn’t your thing,” she starts, her voice quieter than usual, “but after this, my remaining plans tonight consist exclusively of bugging Kan until he packs a bowl for everyone, if you wanted to come with.” You break her eye contact, suddenly not knowing where to put yourself. She stands up, her claws gripping the branch below her and then faster than you can make out, she darts down to a lower branch. “No pressure, obviously. I just wanted to extend the invitation.” A hand reaches up to you in the dark.

\--

You walk back into camp still holding onto The Disciple, trailing softly behind her as she carries a dead howlbeast slung over her shoulders. A circle of trolls sitting outside one of the tents mending folded piles of blankets and clothing wave to her as she passes by, and she lets go of you to run up to an older jadeblood in the group and plants a kiss on her cheek. The jadeblood looks at her sternly and says something about the bloodstains all over her good shirt but takes her hands into her’s so soft and careful all the same, fussing with getting all the stray leaves out of her hair.

They part and The Disciple walks back to where you’ve been standing like an upturned thumbtack on the ground, dead still in the middle of everyone going about their night. She gives you a reassuring smile and you realize how tightly you’re wound and how every step forward feels out of place, and how all of that unravels into something more manageable when she stands right back next to you and leads you further into the stretch of tents, all twisting and turning vibrant patterned fabrics until you get to the clearing; the fire someone coaxed in the middle, trolls lying on blankets or just on the soft tallgrass alone, all of their voices and individual conversation mixing together into a slow hum in your ears. Somewhere in your peripheral, The Disciple heaves the carcass down with a swift motion onto the forest floor. 

Catching up to you while stretching her arms over her head until there’s an audible snap, she tugs on your sleeve to get your attention, and suddenly the world goes back into focus. “You still okay with all this?” Oh fuck. You must’ve been looking all lost on accident. 

You smile, maybe not for yourself necessarily, it doesn’t feel right, but you think it will make her feel better if you have some kind of recognizable emotion. “Yeah I… yeah. I’m okay.” Your voice sounds strange when it’s finally not in your head. 

And then she smiles back, but when she smiles it’s different, it’s familiar to her and fills her whole face and it’s bright and beaming. She takes your hand and runs toward everyone, the soft grass rustling ever so faintly as it parts for the two of you. She waves her hand into the air. “Kan!”

And there’s The Signless, sitting aside an overturned log with a guitar in his hands, the shadows from the fire dancing against the part of his face that’s leaned over looking at the strings. He has a shawl thrown over him, all interwoven with deep grays and browns and reds, his curls falling in front of him in long strokes, stopping just before they’d brush his thighs. He’s humming something under his breath, something you can’t make out in between the crackle of the flames and the background noise of everyone around them, and you think: he looks so  _ calm _ here, just smiling and rocking in time with the little chords under his fingers. You don’t think, if you were The Signless and the fact that you were still breathing was a direct inconvenience to the Empire, you could ever be anything  _ close _ to calm in your life. 

He sees her and leans the guitar beside him to catch her in his arms, Di scooping his jaw into the palms of her hands and peppering his forehead with little kisses. He laughs and it sounds like a song. It’s something so unashamedly delicate you don’t know if you should turn away (everything here is too delicate to be real) but then they beckon you closer and tell you to sit with them and he takes your hand and tells you how glad he is to see you again and gods there’s so much power in that, how they can just choose to  _ feel  _ so much. You wonder if they realize.

“I found him in a tree,” Di says.

“Of course you did. I still don’t know  _ how  _ either of you can do that, by the way.”

Di turns to you. “Kan’s absolutely terrified of heights. The last time I tried to teach him how to climb he just about lost his shit.”

“Hey-”

“I had to carry him on my back all the way down because he couldn’t open his eyes without freaking out, I swear- oh! Hey, thanks,” A rustblood in the circle passes Di a glass piece about the length of your forearm. “Kan, you still have your matches?”

You watch as she presses the flame into the bowl, the inside of the chamber going all milky as the red of the embers sink deeper and deeper into the contents of the bowl before she pulls it out and takes a deep inhale, smoke trailing her nostrils as she passes it to Sign, the bowlpiece still glowing. He does the same, striking a couple of matches before he gets a light that sticks. 

He turns to you. “Have you ever…?”

You shake your head. You’ve seen the piece itself before, the two of them keep it out in the open for everyone to use, but you’ve never thought about actually  _ hitting  _ it. “What…” you try to think of the right thing to say in your head without sounding stupid, “what is it supposed to feel like?” 

“Well,” Sign starts, getting out a glass jar and packing a new bowl, pressing it down softly every so often with the pad of his finger before he crumbles more flower onto it, “it really depends. The strain we grow has a high CBD content, so it mostly is just supposed to relax your muscles and provide pain relief, but there’s a little headspace with it, too. I know for me, at least, it makes me feel a little less anxious and a little more tired but, the good kind of tired, you know. The tired you need sometimes.”

Di chimes in. “You’re totally welcome to try it, if you think it might be something that’ll help! But if you don’t want to, it’s no big deal at all.”

You look at the piece in Sign’s hands, the clear glass inlaid with red swirling up and around the chamber like growing vines. You think, if it can actually make you feel the way he describes it, that would be… something else entirely. “I just don’t really know what to… how to do it.”

“I promise it’s way less complicated than it looks,” Di says, “and I can light it and take it out of the carb for you, so you don’t have to worry about timing or anything!”

You nod and she puts the piece in your lap, letting her fingers brush over the back of your hand when she shows you where you’re supposed to hold the stem. She tells you: “I’m only going to light it for a few seconds, okay? So you don’t have a coughing fit.” You give her a thumbs up. 

“Alright, breathe in on three. One, two…” The match strikes.

\--

The only other time you had been  _ on  _ anything, had your perception chemically altered, it was given to you with no explanation because you weren’t worth one, intravenously in some empty block that looked like all the other empty blocks next to it. You remember you went from thinking about how the walls were so white it hurt to look at them to feeling the wave crash over you and then you were thinking about  _ everything  _ and then you were thinking about  _ nothing  _ and then it went back to everything again as you felt yourself mapping out the synapses firing in your body every nanosecond, how you could  _ feel  _ each individual one like an echo through your skull to the thud thud thud of your pusher and you  _ were _ everything, you were light itself and holy fuck did it  _ burn.  _

This is completely different.

Sign explained as much, but you weren’t expecting- you didn’t think you’d ever intimately know what it felt like to slow down. It creeps onto you inch by inch, this _ sinking  _ into yourself but this time it isn’t drowning, just enveloping in a welcoming way, caught swathed in some kind of warmth all around you. You think in snapshots: running the grass through your fingers over and over again because you like the way it feels under your touch. You’re laughing. You’re laughing? You’re laughing and it feels great, actually. Now you’re two feet off the ground and you don’t remember why, hovering in sparks of red and blue and wow you feel like a  _ cloud,  _ something so slight and beautiful as you move your limbs weightless through the air. Your head peaks over Di’s journal as she scribbles something down in loopy olive script while leaning against Sign, their legs all interwoven. She looks up at you from where you’re hovering and reaches for you, grounding you back onto the floor and beside her, showing you the paragraphs she’s been working on- the scribbled out sentences and the hasty notes sideways in between the margins.

“I’ve been writing about tonight. And about you, see-” she takes your finger and traces it around the twists and curves of her letters, one, two, three, four. “That’s how you write out your title. P - S - I - I. Two I’s, right?” You nod to her, yes, two I’s- but you can’t move your eyes off the paper. On your own, you run the pad of your finger through the motions of the letters over and over and over again until you can see them clear in your head and suddenly these scribbles  _ mean _ something to you. Di slips her pen into your grip and, hesitantly as if it’s going to hurt the book itself, you press down until ink bleeds into the paper. Your grip is shakey and the lines weave in and out of legibility but you go through with each letter in one of the blank margins, looking back to reference her confident strokes until you’re done. You pause, inspecting your work before decisively snapping the cap back onto the pen, handing that and the notebook both back to her. She looks at your writing and glows.

“I can teach you more,” she says, after a few moments pass and she’s properly found her burrowing position in Sign’s arms, “whenever you have some time to kill, just find me and we can work on things. I mean, if you think you’d like that.”

“I would.” Gods, your voice sounds so out of practice. But it doesn’t matter so much, you realize, when you’re with her. When you’re with either of them. “I’d like that a lot.” 

\--

You watch Di fall asleep to the repetitive movements of Sign running his fingers through her scalp over and over, her head resting on his lap, the forgotten journal slipping from her grip and landing upturned on the grass next to them. She grinds her teeth in her sleep. It’s sweet.

So then it’s just you and him, you; with your legs pulled so tight to your chest your kneecaps look like spearheads, and him; the boy that saved you, the boy with the fire in his words, the boy with the bright red showing up in little flakes next to his pupils. You don’t mention that. 

Instead the two of you talk about everything under the sun, how he’s almost nine sweeps and he didn’t ever really picture making it this long  _ (“Mom doesn’t like it when I talk about myself like that, but it’s true, even in my dreams I never make it this far- ”)  _ and in return you tell him how you didn’t think you’d make it till now either, but also how you’ve never really given it much thought because it’s never felt okay to think that far in the future  _ (but you sign it, too, all slow along with your words. Signing it makes it feel better.) _ There’s silence. You draw spirals on the ground as the light from the fire grows dimmer and dimmer into the night.

“It’s just,” he starts, “I guess it’s just the world feels so big now. I don’t know what I’m doing- ever, maybe, there are some times when I feel like for one perfect moment I do- but then I realize how much more there is left to be done and how absolutely fucking minuscule I am compared to all of that and then it’s just like, I’m a wriggler, again, Tuna, and I- oh. Fuck.” 

Your words almost choke you. “How do you know that.” There’s a hissing noise around you and sparks start swarming your vision and your hair picks up in the static. “My hatchname-  _ how _ do you know that.” 

“I swear, it’s-”

“Don’t lie to me.”

His eyes are transfixed to the ground as he runs a hand through his curls and smiles as if to say  _ I’ve really done it now, huh,  _ and then he stops in thought. It crosses your mind: he’s not scared of you. He should be scared of you.

“Would you believe me,” he says, “if I told you it was in a dream?”

So he tells you about his visions. About the world Before, a little about  _ his _ Mituna and  _ his _ Meulin and  _ his  _ Porrim and how there must have been more who are here now too- his description feels purposely fragmented. He’s tiptoeing delicately, rethinking every word he says after it’s out loud and the whole time you can tell how hard he’s searching into your eyes for approval, for some type of sign to know he hasn’t lost you.

“I sound crazy I-” he breathes out. There’s a pause. “I  _ know  _ I sound crazy.” You realize while talking he’s bunched the fabric of his shawl in between his fingers in anxious tugs, running through it over and over which such intensity you’re sure it’s going to unravel. “And I wouldn’t believe myself, either, if I didn’t know what it felt like to be there.

“There’s a type of fear there still and- and inequality, I guess, on a completely different scale- but this  _ weight,  _ Psii. This weight that you and me and everyone we’ve cared about carries with them every single night for so long that it just feels like it’s a part of us is suddenly. Absent. There aren’t eyes all over your back and you don’t have this intrinsic urge to jump out of your skin every time you make a step forward and what I wouldn’t  _ give _ to bring all of you there, even if it’s not forever. Even if it’s just for a moment. And I guess that’s why I choose to speak, because what kind of fucking  _ sin _ did all of us commit- by virtue of just getting thrown into this specific rock in this specific existence- that justifies all this? What could we have ever possibly  _ done  _ to deserve any of this? And why do we need to be vindicated? I just know this: this isn’t living. Not really.”

He doesn’t belong here. You realize as much now, to the exact extent of how everything he’s made up of contradicts the very nature of this planet but instead of scaring you away, it ignites something deep inside of you, some all-consuming need to carve out the hurt from Alternia until this world finally has a place for him. The last of the embers die out. Before you can overthink it, you grab for his still-fidgeting hands in the darkness, holding them under your touch so delicate before you carefully intertwine your fingers with his. You squeeze them tight as if to say:  _ I’m here. _

“I believe you,” you say, all quiet. “And- you can call me Mituna. You and your matesprit.” 

And somewhere in that silence, in that cold, in that dark: you feel him squeeze back. “I’m glad you chose to leave, you know. And I want you to know that: none of us here think that was any kind of straightforward decision. You put your trust in us and you put your trust in yourself and that's, there's power in that, Mituna.” You smile. “I can't tell you how good it feels to have found you again.”

You look out at the clearing, the tents, the beginnings of the forest, and the whole wide world that’s beyond. It’s still terrifying and you don’t think it’ll ever feel completely safe, but there’s something new there, too. The way the dew rests on the blades of grass. The trees swaying back and forth, back and forth in the wind. The deep reds and blues and purples of the sky. The two trolls next to you and the ins and outs of their steady breathing, how soft his hands are when they’re intertwined with yours: it’s beautiful. You can  _ see _ beautiful now.

“I’m glad I’m here too.”


End file.
